It’s difficult to imagine anyone except for Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger playing the lead roles in Brokeback Mountain, but it might have been very different. Before Ang Lee took over, Gus Van Sant was developing the film. However, he’s recently told Indiewire that one of the reasons he didn’t make the movie was how difficult it was to find someone to star.
He says “Nobody wanted to do it. I was working on it, and I felt like we needed a really strong cast, like a famous cast. That wasn’t working out. I asked the usual suspects: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Ryan Phillippe. They all said no.”
It could have been a very different film with them, but before we cry ‘homophobia’ for their decision not to make the movie, Van Sant adds that he was angling to make a movie very different to what others involved were hoping for. He comments, “The original story, which was in The New Yorker, was so beautiful and simple, and Larry [McMurtry, screenwriter] had turned it into something that resembled ‘The Last Picture Show’. Which was really good if you were thinking along certain lines … I was thinking more like ‘Gerry,’ ‘Elephant,’ ‘Last Days.’ I kind of wanted to go back to the simplest view of the short story, which I couldn’t do … I didn’t really want to go and talk Larry and Diana [Ossana, producer] out of what they had created, because it was great.”
Ossana confirmed to Indiewire that those actors were approached, but was very diplomatic about why they might have turned it down, just saying, “Yes, all those young gentlemen (at the time) turned down the project, for various reasons.”
It’s also known that Mark Wahlberg was approached and turned the movie down. At the time Gyllenhaal and Ledger were up and comers, although it was still almost unheard of for a mainstream American film to cast two well-known heterosexual actors to play gay romantic leads in a movie. Indeed, it hasn’t happened that many times since.
Before I Know What You Did Last Summer, 54 and Cruel Intentions, Ryan Phillippe began his career on the legenary US soap, One Life To Live. In 1992 and 1993 he appeared in several episodes of the show as illy Douglas, who just happened to be the first gay teen on US daytime TV.
There are certainly people in Hollywood who must have a painting of themselves growing older in their attics, as they never seem to age. That includes Ryan Phillippe, who’s looking pretty much the same now as he did 20 years ago in the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions.
The story of the 1998 movie movie 54 has passed into movie lore, with the movies finished by director Mark Christopher, but then hacked up by the studio, who removed, among other things, all reference to Ryan Philippe’s character being bisexual.
John Cusack and Ryan Phillippe are sometimes allowed in major Hollywood movies, but they spend a lot of time grafting away in the endless line of thrillers that get made and hope to do well enough on DVD to make their money back.